Dan Simmons - Black Hills

They swoop down and start up again. There is no more loading or pausing. The second revolution is more wonderful than the first.

Paha Sapa knows that the boilers that provide the steam for Ferris’s Wheel, for aesthetic reasons, are more than seven hundred feet away across Lexington Avenue, but he imagines as the great wheel accelerates that he can hear the boilers roar louder. He knows that he can hear the steam pressure in the giant cylinders of the thousand-horsepower engine at the base of the wheel rise in volume. One glance at Rain de Plachette’s flushed features and bright eyes tells him that she hears this as well.

The rest is silence. Not even Doyle and Rheva and Alex and the other two children in the opposite corner make a noise. The conductor has turned his back to them and is at the door looking out his own window. The only hint of sound now is the whoosh of the large cabin through the air and the occasional creak of the cage shifting on the overhead trunnions or a low, almost inaudible grind from the gigantic central axle more than seventy feet from them.

The Wheel rises higher, higher, the White City in the east distance coming back into full view as they rise smoothly and silently. Paha Sapa looks out past the wooded island and lagoons and treetops, out to Lake Michigan, and sees the high afternoon sun break through the clouds and shine a single shaft of light down on the waters of the lake. The shaft of sunlight is so bright that everything else seems to fade and darken—the Midway, the White City, the trees and lagoons, the people, the harbor and lake itself—until there is only that powerful searchlight of pure sunshine pouring down on a limited circle of Lake Michigan wave tops far to the east.

Why is that image so hauntingly familiar? Why does it move him so?

Paha Sapa realizes and remembers just as the car heads up over the curve of the high arc, leaving the White City, Lake Michigan, and the prophetic shaft of light behind; then the car completes its voyage over the top and shows them all the western end of the Midway Plaisance and the distant prairies again. Even this view is striking, with the many shades of green and brown receding to the distant horizon—toward the prairies he knows so well a thousand miles west—but also with a web of train tracks and moving locomotives moving in toward Chicago, streaking the sky with their plumes of dark smoke.

But it is not the view that grips Paha Sapa and—he is sure, with no vision tricks necessary—Rain de Plachette on this second revolution and downward rush. It is the pure thrill and pleasure of speed and movement through space. Paha Sapa is surprised at the thought that strikes him next— Only the wasichu can do such things. The Fat Takers are wakan in their own way, and it is a powerful magic.

Then it is over and they are stopped and the guard has taken his brass key and unlocked the north door and they are all disembarking the cabin as mobs wait to board on the opposite, south side. The platforms and steps under girders and metal arches around and beneath the huge Wheel are an environment out of Jules Verne. (The friars at the Deadwood tent school, for some inexplicable reason, had English-language versions—he was sure the friars had translated them themselves—of Voyage to the Center of the Earth, From the Earth to the Moon, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea , and the newest, Around the World in Eighty Days hidden away in a trunk in their own tent, and Paha Sapa crept in and stole—borrowed—and read all of them within weeks of his learning to read.)

Miss de Plachette’s expression is one of pure joy. She seizes his forearm in a death grip that shuts off all circulation.

— Oh, Paha Sapa… I would give anything to experience that again.

Paha Sapa removes from his pocket another dollar, a week’s wages for him, gently takes her by the elbow, and leads her around through the Jules Verne world-of-the-future girder-and-metal-arch maze to the back of the growing line waiting to board on the south side. He surreptitiously checked his watch while they were still riding. They have time.

THEIR FIRST TWO TIMES AROUND, they were almost alone and hardly spoke at all. Their second two times around, there are at least twenty-five people in the car, but Paha Sapa and Rain de Plachette speak the entire time—softly, privately, secure in their own world somewhere between the Jackson Park–Midway Plaisance earth and the blue-sky-and-scattered-clouds Illinois heavens.

— You’ll pardon me for asking a personal question, Miss de Plachette, but isn’t Rain an unusual name for wa… for white people? Beautiful… very beautiful… but I haven’t heard it before.

Paha Sapa’s heart is pounding wildly. He is terrified of giving offense, of making her pull away from him—literally, as she rests her right shoulder against his left, but also in terms of offending her in any way. But he is aching from curiosity.

She smiles at him as they rise on the eastern part of their first slow revolution.

— It is an unusual name, Mr…. Paha Sapa. But my mother also thought it was beautiful. The most beautiful word she’d learned in the English language, is what she told my father. When I was born and she wanted to name me Rain, Father didn’t protest. He loved her very much. Did you know that my mother was Lakota?

Paha Sapa feels a constriction in his chest and throat.

— Yes. I mean, no… that is, I heard a rumor….

She smiles again. The other passengers are making nervous noises as the large car sways and creaks on its trunnion when it stops, but they are veterans now.

— Well, the rumor’s true. Her name was White Shawl and I’m told that she was very pale for a Sioux… a Lakota. She was Father’s choir director at the agency mission and they… Did I tell you that Father was doing mission work in Nebraska when they met?

— No. Please go on. Tell me more.

Miss de Plachette looks out as the car stops and rocks again—there are afternoon cloud shadows moving over the trees and lagoon and walkways and giant buildings of the White City now—and he sees the slight blush beneath the freckles that cross the bridge of her nose and become fewer in number on her cheeks.

— That’s how Father met Mr. Cody, of course. Mr. Cody’s new ranch was right next to the agency—reservation—where father spent five years as a missionary. There were several groups… tribes… there. Lakota and Shoshoni and a few Cheyenne and Creek and one family of Cherokee. It was a small agency, but the church had been there a long time, and the people came from miles around. Not just Indians…

She blushes again and Paha Sapa smiles, encouraging her to go on. They are at the last stop before the high point of the wheel’s circle. The crowded car is alive with oohs and ahhs and gasps and exclamations.

— I mean, Mr. Cody and his ranch hands—some of them were Indians as well—of course you know that—would come over and the congregation was often more than a hundred people. Very large for that wild part of Nebraska. Mother was choir director, as I said, and she also taught all the children at the mission school there, and… well… Father and Mother fell in love and were married there…. Mr. Cody was Father’s best man at the wedding, and the Reverend Kyle came all the way from Omaha to perform the ceremony. And I was born a year later and, so my Father tells me, it was raining the week I was born that June… the first real rain in more than seven months of drought… and Mother named me Rain, and then she died when I was four and we moved East a few months later and I’ve never been back.